i873«] Mineral Riches of the Philippines. 319 



part of them. Whatever reports may have been made by 

 the Spanish mining engineers (of which corps a certain 

 number are stationed in the Philippines), with one or two 

 exceptions, they have not been published, and are buried, 

 with other similar documents, in the archives, and practi- 

 cally inaccessible. 



The mining operations of the natives are conducted in 

 the simplest and most imperfect manner, and the natural 

 consequence is that the product is of inferior quality, and 

 the ore not fully reduced. It is so difficult to persuade this 

 indolent and perversely ignorant people of the advantage of 

 adopting any modern improvement, that in the manufacture 

 of one of the greatest products of the country — sugar — it is 

 only within a very few years that Indians rich enough to 

 afford proper machinery for crushing the cane and boiling 

 the juice have been induced to adopt the iron mills and 

 proper boilers. In what are called the mines here (with a 

 very few exceptions) the processes are precisely the same as 

 they were before the arrival of Europeans in the colony. 

 The theory of the native that what was done in the time of 

 his grandfather is good enough for him at the present day, 

 is too firmly rooted to be abolished. In addition to this, 

 the greater part of the mining adventurers here are of a 

 class which, having little or no means beyond their hands 

 and a few of the rudest implements, prefer the half-idle and 

 half-gambling life of a gold-seeker to the more solid results 

 of constant and well-directed labour in other directions. 

 Great ignorance is the constant source of disappointment. 

 The most common minerals are mistaken for valuable ores, 

 and time after time it has been the disagreeable duty of the 

 writer to disabuse enthusiastic speculators who in the 

 common iron pyrites thought they had discovered a vein of 

 gold, or in the brilliant arsenical pyrites a deposit of platina. 

 Nor is it easy to convince these people of their mistakes, for, 

 being a very suspicious race, and generally unscrupulous, 

 they fancy others are trying to circumvent them, and ap- 

 propriate their so-called discoveries, as many of them would 

 do to others if opportunity offered. 



Gold, being very generally disseminated through the 

 Archipelago, has naturally, from its value, and the com- 

 parative ease with which it is reduced from the ore, been 

 the principal object of search in the Philippines. Silver 

 (argentiferous galena) is rare, but there are innumerable 

 points at which gold may be found ; the greater part of the 

 metal being that of " lavaderos," or washings of rivers and 

 small streams. In such situations it is found in minute 



